When you homestead life takes on a whole new meaning....meaning you take on a whole new life. Welcome to our little patch of heaven. Pull up a chair, I'll get you glass of sun tea and we'll chat a spell. Life on the homestead is definitely sunny side up!

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

DIY Wood Pallet Goat Shelter

One of the great things about Brad working for a large local business is they throw a LOT of great stuff away...like wood pallets. His dumpster diving has provided us with some excellent materials for homestead projects. A recent project for us was converting our kidding pen into a covered goat shelter for our growing herd.

We started with the basic walls we made this past Spring for our kidding pen.

Brad and our friend Don, reassembled the kidding pen in a newly fenced section of pasture. They then gathered some scrap pieces of lumber to make a gambrel type of rafters over the pen.

Once the rafters were secure, the exterior was covered in contractor grade white plastic. This works great as a wind barrier. You will notice that we also used a skid with hinges for the door.

We then covered the top and sides with a heavy tarp. We had the tarp tied down in this pic. Several weeks later, we had heavy wind gusts (in excess of 50mph) rip most of the tarp off. We used more pieces of scrap lumber to nail it down along the side edges. It has stood well for the past several storms.

This shelter is roughly 16 x 20 and was very easy to build. After we figured up the materials needed to build it, the cost was less then 40 dollars. Over half that was the cost of the green tarp.

This design would make an excellent green house, potting shed, chicken house, etc. If you reinforced the bottom frame, it could easily be placed on wheels/skids and used as a portable livestock shelter.

I have to say this pallet frame building would also make a great temporary hunting camp or emergency shelter. I was very surprised how warm it was in the shelter once we had the tarp and wall plastic secure. I was much more comfortable in it then in our big 3 season camping tent. We will definitely continue to build other shed buildings using this design.

I am really inspired by the construction creativity you can do with wood pallets. I've got all kinds of ideas starting to bubble up in my head...

About Us

What happens when two quirky middle aged people start homesteading? You get Green Acres with all the outtakes and bloopers! Come along with us as we live each day, side stepping the meadow muffins in life and collecting each adventure...one egg at a time